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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26163355">and no one will explain to me why</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/eagle_eyes/pseuds/eagle_eyes'>eagle_eyes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>found family bingo fics [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Team as Family, just a fairly dysfunctional one, unfortunately</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 02:35:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,050</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26163355</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/eagle_eyes/pseuds/eagle_eyes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"She was glad they’d been able to be a family. Even if it was marred by tragedy. Even if it was only for a little while."</p><p>A vengeance demon pays her respects.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Anya Jenkins &amp; Scoobies, Anya Jenkins &amp; Tara Maclay, Minor or Background Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>found family bingo fics [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1899952</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Found Family Bingo</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>and no one will explain to me why</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the "Funeral" prompt for Found Family Bingo</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Anya got the feeling that the others hadn’t expected her to come. </p><p>Maybe under different circumstances she’d be offended or defensive about that; how could the people she’d called her friends think that she wouldn’t come to pay respects? But right now, she couldn’t exactly blame them. She hadn’t expected to come either.</p><p>She was immortal again; D’Hoffryn would say she was above mortality. Death and grief should have been meaningless to her. And as a vengeance demon, caring about humans was kind of incompatible with her job description. Attending a human funeral was absolutely off-limits. If D’Hoffryn knew about it, she’d be out of a job like <em>that</em>. </p><p>Anya told herself that she wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t Tara.</p><p>Tara had been...special. There was no other word for it. She’d always been kind and understanding, and had explained things to Anya but not in the patronising way that the others so often slipped into. It seemed almost ungrateful to just take off as if nothing had happened. That was probably why the stupid, human part of her, which kept having these stupid, human thoughts no matter how much she tried to knuckle down and just <em>be Anyanka</em> again, had insisted that she ought to go to the funeral and pay her respects, whatever that meant. It was pointless, obviously. Tara was gone, and Anya showing up to pay respects wasn’t going to change that. If there was one thing she’d learned in her thousand-odd years as a demon, it was that once something bad happened, it had happened. Anything you did to try to make yourself feel better afterwards couldn’t change that. That was something she got that humans never seemed to.</p><p>Unfortunately, it turned out that after three years of being in charge, the stupid, human part of her had become kind of hard to shut up. So, here she was. At the funeral.</p><p>Still, there were some things she just couldn’t face. Her friends, first and foremost. Her...family, for lack of a better word.</p><p>Anya had never had a family before. Well, not exactly, logically she knew that she must have had a family at some point before becoming a demon. But that was over a thousand years ago. So long ago as to be meaningless to her by now. </p><p>But after a thousand years on her own, something strange had happened. She’d become part of something bigger than herself. At first she’d told herself it was just pragmatism. She was dating Xander, and Xander was always hanging out with his Scooby Gang buddies, so if she wanted to spend time with Xander she had to hang out with the Scoobies too. But it had become more than that. </p><p>She remembered it clear as day: the day that Tara’s “real” family had come to take her home. Anya hadn’t been sure how to feel at first; she liked Tara well enough, but she didn’t know her, exactly, and Tara had cast that spell on them which made Anya unsure if she could trust the witch. But then Tara’s father had accused his daughter of being a demon and claimed that she needed to be controlled because of that, and Anya had just thought that was unfair. Why should Tara be punished for something she had no control over? And what did this guy have against demons anyway? Sure, some demons did evil things, but not <em>all</em> of them were bad - she was proof of that!</p><p>And so when the other Scoobies had stood up for Tara, Anya had stood with them, and felt for the first time like part of a larger whole. She’d even got the chance to humiliate Mr Maclay by showing everyone that he didn’t know as much about demons as he thought. That was where it had all started.</p><p>It was all over now. The failed wedding had split her from the others, her return to vengeance demon status had cemented it, and now with Tara gone, she didn’t even know if she <em>wanted</em> to be part of their little gang anymore. There was too much pain there.</p><p>So instead of joining them, talking to them, commiserating with them, she stood at the edge of the small crowd of fellow students and Wiccans who made up the non-Scooby delegation at the funeral. She stood and listened to the eulogy and stared at nothing in particular, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers.</p><p>Her roots were growing out now, hair turning dark. At some point in the mess of the last month she’d stopped remembering to dye it, and now... </p><p>Well. There didn’t seem to be much point in starting again.</p><p>Tara used to dye her hair. Much like Anya, she had naturally quite dark hair but used to dye it blonde. It was yet another of the tiny things that connected the two of them, like their odd senses of humour or their status as former “demons”. At some point during sophomore year Tara had stopped dying her hair bleach blonde and let her natural dark blonde grow out. Anya had asked her about that once - she couldn’t remember exactly when but it had been before Buffy’s death and early enough that the two of them still didn’t really know each other that well. But Tara and Willow and Buffy had come over to her and Xander’s apartment for drinking and card games and movies, and Buffy had to leave early to patrol as always but Willow and Tara had ended up crashing on their couch, and at some point past one in the morning Xander and Willow fell asleep, leaving just Anya sat on the floor steadily making her way through an entire bottle of rum, and Tara trying to tell her one of her weird convoluted jokes between sips of cheap wine.</p><p>Anya had very quickly got bored of the joke, and interrupted to ask Tara why she’d stopped dying her hair. After the couple of seconds it took for Tara to process that question, she decided to overshare in the way you only can to your girlfriend’s best friend’s girlfriend while drunk on convenience store alcohol.</p><p>She’d explained to Anya how she’d started dying her hair after her mom died because she knew it would piss off her dad, but also because she thought maybe if she changed her hair up so dramatically it would help her become more confident. She admitted that that hadn’t worked at all - she’d still been the same anxious, stuttery teenager she always was, only now the other kids at her high school could bully her over her shitty dye job on top of everything else they already targeted her for (and she’d laughed and nearly spilled her wine when Anya indignantly yelled about how she’d help Tara get vengeance on those assholes if she wanted, and then slid onto the floor and clapped a hand over Anya’s mouth and giggled as she told her not to wake up Willow and Xander). Even though it hadn’t really helped, Tara explained, she’d kept it up well into college out of habit more than anything, and hey! Willow had certainly seemed to like it!</p><p>(At this point, Tara had turned around and grinned at Willow, out cold on the couch, and launched into what would probably have become a comprehensive list of “times Willow was really cute about playing with my hair” if Anya hadn’t shoved her gently and told her to get on with why you stopped dying your hair, you sap.)</p><p>Tara had blushed at that, but the crooked smile didn’t leave her face. She’d told Anya, in a slightly quieter tone, that after she started dating Willow and got brought into the Scooby Gang she’d started feeling more comfortable in her own skin. She finally had the confidence her naive teenage self had thought dying her hair would help with. She didn’t need it anymore. </p><p>“I think you really helped me, you know,” Tara had turned to Anya, grinning. </p><p>“I’m sure we did,” Anya had replied, only half comprehending the words coming out of her own mouth through the rum-induced haze, “‘Cuz you know, having friends who support you and all, that’s really importan’ I think.”</p><p>“No, no, tha’s not what I-” Tara clapped a hand on Anya’s shoulder with slightly too much force, “I mean you. I always thought there was something wrong with me ‘cuz I was a demon, y’know. But then I met you, and you were a demon, or you used to be anyway, and you were so <em>cool</em>. You’re so cool, Anya! You just...you don’t care what anyone thinks about you and that’s sooo great. I’m trying to be more like you.”</p><p>“Pfft, that’s <em>easy</em>!” said Anya, very rapidly losing control of her own volume, “All you gotta do to be like me, right, is get rid of your, like, brain-to-mouth-filter. You just think about something, like how much you love money, and then you just say it, preferably kinda loudly! Oh, and be scared of bunnies! There you go, tha’s Anya 101.”</p><p>Tara had smiled softly. “I kinda love you, y’know. Not in a gay way!” she hastily added, blushing scarlet, “Cuz th’ gay love’s all reserved for Willow, but...god, I dunno. You’re very special, Anya.”</p><p>And in that moment Anya had realised something. Humans were mortal and petty and fragile and ridiculous but she <em>cared</em> about them. She cared about Tara. Not for any reason. Not because Tara had anything to offer her, though she had always offered so much in kindness and patience and understanding. She cared about the shy girl who once upon a time had just been a friend of a friend of her boyfriend, and who was now sitting on the floor of Anya’s apartment pouring her heart out over cheap alcohol and telling Anya she was special. She cared about Tara because Tara was family.</p><p>The thing about families, of course, was that there tended to be deaths in them.</p><p>Anya couldn’t hang around after the funeral was over. She wasn’t proud of that - Tara would probably have wanted her and the other Scoobies to be united today, but the thought of facing them made her skin crawl. It would make everything too real.</p><p>There were things she wanted to say to all of them. She wanted to tell Xander not to blame himself for what Warren did. That he was far from the first person in human history to freeze in a panic at the worst possible moment. But she didn’t know how to talk to Xander anymore.</p><p>She wanted to tell Willow that if she hadn’t killed Warren, Anya probably would have done it herself. It wouldn’t have been hard to manipulate someone into making a wish against him and enact vengeance; if the Scoobies were too savvy to fall for it, she could always track down Jonathan and Andrew and probably talk them into saying something against him. Vengeance was kind of her job now, and getting justice for Tara seemed like the least she could do for her family. Besides, killing a bastard like Warren would be far from the worst thing she’d ever done. Ethically speaking, she could have taken the hit in a way Willow couldn’t. But it was too late for that now.</p><p>She wanted to tell Giles that she was glad he didn’t die when the Magic Box was destroyed. That the world might be harsh and cruel and unfair, but it was a slightly brighter place to be for having him in it. But that felt wrong to say at the funeral of someone who’d also done so much to make their world brighter, and who’s own light was now gone forever.</p><p>There was so much she wanted to say. That she’d miss being part of the Scooby Gang. That she didn’t know if she could really belong among the vengeance demons again, now that all of them, including Tara, <em>especially</em> Tara, had touched her life so deeply. That she was glad they’d been able to be a family. Even if it was marred by tragedy. Even if it was only for a little while. </p><p>But this wasn’t the time or the place for any of it.</p>
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